Simple Behavior Modification Every Cancer Patient Should Be Aware Of

Sometimes I wonder about our medical community.  On the one hand brilliance can issue forth, on the other, abject ignorance.  The fact that oncologist and other physicians either are not taught about metabolism or did not pay attention in class, should not mean that this knowledge should not be commonly known and given to every single cancer patient.

You can put your body in a state where cancer cannot eat.  

What?  

Yes, you can put your body into a state where cancer cannot eat.  Further, this same state will be a state where your body has a far better likely hood of recognizing the cancer as a foreign object and killing it or signaling it to die.

Some background.  How does your body work?  You might have a logical answer as will I, but they will generally be completely different.  In order to describe how you work, we need a frame of reference.  Most of us both understand and can give a good description of how our cars work, so let’s start with that analogy.  As we know the engine is one of the most, if not the most critical component of a vehicle.  So what about in your vehicle?  What is your engine?

Well, your engine is something called a mitochondria.  Mitochondria live inside certain types of cells within our body.  There can be thousands of mitochondria within a single cell.  All of these mitochondria combine to produce energy which we use to live and function.  Mitochondria are also what powers cancers, although they ONLY function in one very specific fuel substrate called glucose.  We will discuss this and how we can use this AGAINST the cancer.

So generally, what type of fuel do mitochondria need?  That is a pretty darn important question!  Mitochondria burn something called adenosine triphosphate or ATP.  ATP can be generated from three different substrates.  We should all pay attention here!  These substrates equate to “gears”.  Low gear is fueled by glucose, as are cancer mitochondria.  Every single cell will run on glucose or sugars.  These sugars could come from natural sources such as fruits and vegetables, or from simple sources like molecular sugars found in candies and other processed foods.  Some of these molecular sugars are like crack cocaine to cells.  They not only prefer to run on it, they will demand it (for up to forty eight hours as discussed below).

“Gear two” is fueled by fatty acids.  In particular the fats found in nuts and seeds.  These fats are all the fats your body wants to stick on a triglyceride and in particular they are saturated fats, mono-unsaturated fats, and poly-unsaturated fats (omega 3 and omega 6).  Saturated fats and omega 6 fats are inflammatory while omega 3 fats and mono-unsaturated fats are anti-inflammatory.  When your mitochondria flip to running on fats they are up to eighty (80) times more efficient.  Kind of like putting nitro in your fuel tank.

“Gear three” is where the mitochondria are fueled by light.  This happens in photosynthesis and research is just beginning to appreciate the energy gains we sustain from our environment that cannot be accounted for by caloric intake.  While we know plants have a gear three, we do have enough research yet to understand how this might be applied to cancer.  Further, it is not well understood how a cell might be “forced” into this mode.  So for now, we will leave this in the TDB category as to help with cancer.

Now, here is the info that is critical if you are a cancer patient or love one.  We will talk some metabolism and some immune response.

So how do you go from gear one to gear two?  Eighty times more efficient is something we would all benefit from.  It turns out all you have to do is not eat for five hours.  Yep, just don’t eat for five (5) hours!  When you eat, your body starts a process called “anabolism” which is basically “build mode”.  Your body starts breaking down and processing the food you just ate.  MAINLY for the fats BTW.  For five hours your body will build cholesterol, which is your main building block.  Addition for that same five hours your body will be storing fats and running on glucose.  This is gear one, the “running on glucose”.  When you are running on glucose your body stores fats, regardless of your weight.  Your body circulates glucose as it is needed to fuel your cells.  When your body is circulating glucose it is literally providing a hand delivered meal to cancer.  Cancers eat sugars and sugary hormones.

Five hours after eating a meal, provided you do not eat another one, your body will flip at the cellular level.  This flip will cause your body to enter a “catabolic” state and start to burn fats as fuel and start to use the cholesterol it just made.  Yes, your body can and does use cholesterol and cholesterol is the genesis for testosterone, estrogen, and almost all hormones and steroids…in addition every cell is “built” form cholesterol.  In this fat burning mode your body will basically ignore glucose.  Minor amounts are needed for muscles, but generally your body is running on fats. 

If someone can not eat for forty eight hours (48) their bodies will have burned through all the glucose they had circulating and stored for minor events in muscles and other organs. IN THIS STATE, CANCER CANNOT EAT.  Yes, two days of only drinking water will cause your cancer to begin to shrink as it cannot eat.   Something to consider if you have an aggressive cancer.

What!  I cannot go two days without eating!  I’ll starve you might say!  Most of us can go up to forty (40) days without food.  You can monitor your body fat and as long as you stay above a certain percentage (ask a doc) then you will be fine.  The issue most of us have is we are addicted to sugar (the crack cocaine like stuff) and our cells will crave it for about the same forty eight hours.  Past that you really do not get hungry.  Many reported accounts of this consistent one to two day hunger period followed by no hunger past.  So if you can make for two days pretty easy to make it a week.

Further, if you can go just five hours and not eat, your immune system ALSO switches into high gear.  We begin a process called autophagy where we clean up bacteria and dysfunctioning cellular processes, like cancer.  We become far more efficienct in our process and our immune system is at full force and strength.  If you are a doc or a researcher please do some reading on AMPK and the P53 pathway.  AMPK is the “cellular switch” which flips between anabolism and catabolism.

If you eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner you spend very little time in “gear two”.  In fact most of us live in “gear one” where we are susceptible to cancers, bacterial infections, COVID, and many diseases.  Further, if we are consuming alot of dietary sugar, which is like crack cocaine for cancer and bacterial cells, we are just adding to our angst.

So what can you do?  Well that depends on how bad the cancer is.  Aggressive cancer should be met with aggressive measures and that means fasting.  I would recommend fasting for over forty eight hours (48) as this is how long it takes you to get rid of the glucose.  There are many online resources as to how to do this safely.  You want to make sure you are ALWAYS consuming water and lots of it.

If your cancer is less aggressive or perhaps you are on chemo now, I would suggest intermittent fasting.   This is also a great way to control your weight.  What you do is only eat in a six to eight hour window.  The smaller you can make the window the better.  Eat as much as you want during your window.  Avoid sugars, carbs, and fruits.  Fruits are healthy but also contain fructose which is a sugar.  Nuts and seeds are ideal.  Again, there is alot of guidance from dietitians that can help you do this and many different plans.  Drink water, lots of water.

A hungry bear when it emerges from its cave at the end of its hibernation will only eat for about two hours per day.  They might eat ALOT in that two hours, but that is all the time they spend “foraging”.  They maintain the two hour foraging time all throughout the spring and summer.  By the end of the summer all bears are lean and buff.  This is the very reason they have the eating behavior they do, to maintain lean mass.  When they get ready to fatten up for hibernation they change their eating FREQUENCY.  They start eating 20 hours per day.  They may eat far less, but they STORE THE FAT due to the metabolic principals described above.  In so doing they are able to gain fat stores which fuel them through hibernation.  They completely control their fat stores just by their eating frequency…NOT volume.

If you or someone you love has cancer, please have them consider fasting as a strategy.  It is a behavior change that is within all of our control.  It is something discussed as beneficial in just about every religion.  And I can tell you from personal experience that it is a game changer where it comes to cancer and cancer treatments.